Tom Clancy’s ‘Netforce’
TOM CLANCY made himself a millionaire by exploiting his peculiar paranoia in books that were readable, uncannily prescient and built for the movie screen.
Whether his heroes were hunting for Red October deep in the ocean or playing patriot games in Latin America, they seemed always to be at the right life-imitates-art spot at the right time.
Now comes his made-for-ABC “Netforce” to remind us that no one is perfect, that technology without morality is a bummer.
Oh, and that Scott Bakula is no Harrison Ford, and trying to cast the Internet as a character in a thriller is about as productive as trying to pass off the Yellow Pages as a book.
It’s the year 2005 and organized crime has turned the worldwide web into one big bad chat room, invariably badly lighted.
After Kris Kristofferson is killed, which renders him only slightly more stiff an actor than usual, Alex Michaels (Bakula) is suddenly elevated to head of the FBI’s computer-crime busters.
Before he can say dot com, someone’s crashing the web, which invariably causes traffic jams, among other problems.
It isn’t long before we know it’s Will Styles, a browser-pushing computer tycoon who’s supposed to remind us of an extreme Bill Gates but is played by Judge Reinhold as a character who couldn’t make the casting cut in “Hyperion Bay.”
Styles is such a cowboy that he scares off a Chinese mobster (Cary-Hiroyuki) who has a badly dressed Italian consigliere and underboss by putting the hit on Kristofferson, an old-fashioned mafiosi and, finally, Alex, who is no Hercule Poirot.
But then, nobody’s terribly forward-thinking here, even if it is 2005 and crooks delete, rather than flush, the incriminating stuff in their possession.
Presidents still have affairs. Itty-bitty convertibles are still hip.
Italian mothers still push food and their daughters on any eligible men even if the daughter (Going) is trying to juggle a promotion by and affair with the boss (Alex).
Kathie Me is still a fixture on TV. So are precocious moppets who understand that their daddy is much too busy saving the country to remember their birthdays.
The only thing new Clancy and scriptwriter Lionel Chetwynd have brought to the mix are virtual-sci-fi touches that would be droll if everything else weren’t such a drag.
Alas, we spend far too little time in the chat rooms filled with virtual people in virtual disguise and far too much time listening to characters trying to talk a tough-guy game.
Just before he gets offed by an assassin disguised as a Vegas hooker, the Italian mobster complains about having to take orders from Don Cheng,
“You know, he can do my freakin’ laundry and roast my duck, but I don’t want him messing with my bisuness . . . whose idea was it to make a Chinese guy a made man?”
But he’s not the only one getting no respect.
“Does anyone realize we’re out there on the frontlines fighting this stuff with one hand tied behind our backs,” whines Alex after muffing a big e-bust.
“You computer cops . . . make the civil liberties people real uneasy, so if you ever, and I mean ever, time-jump an e-warrant again, your asses are gonna need skin transplants,” growls Brian Dennehy.
He is sadly misused as a presidential aide who does little more than sit next to CCH Pounder and threaten people’s glutes in what are supposed to be colorful terms but are merely reminders that Clancy has run out of ideas and steam and longs for good old Luddite days.
